Thursday marks the 118th birthday of the late Charles F. Richter. You know the name, even if you don’t know the person.

Richter was a seismologist who worked with Beno Gutenberg to develop a magnitude scale for measuring earthquakes — the Richter scale. Yes, that Richter.

But did you know he was from Butler County? He was born April 26, 1900, in Overpeck, a section of St. Clair Township. The annual Richter Day will be celebrated Thursday at his historical marker in Trenton.

Richter’s family moved to California — the perfect place to study earthquakes — where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, and worked at the Seismology Institute. In 1935, he published a paper describing the earthquake magnitude scale that has made Richter a household name.

Richter is not the only local name to be immortalized as a namesake more famous than the person:

• Heimlich maneuver. In 1974, Dr. Henry Heimlich was the director of surgery at Jewish Hospital, then located in Avondale, when he and his researchers developed the abdominal thrust method for treating choking victims. The maneuver that bears his name has been used to save more than 100,000 lives, according to data compiled by the Heimlich Institute.

• McGuffey Readers. Folks of a certain age well remember the grade-school primer books developed by educator William Holmes McGuffey starting way back in 1836 and used in schools through the mid-1900s. McGuffey was a professor at Miami University when Cincinnati publishers Truman and Smith asked him to create the textbooks, which have sold about 125 million copies. The readers promote morals and manners as well as reading, and are still used in homeschooling.

• National Audubon Society. The environmental organization known for birdwatching and conservation, incorporated in 1905, was named for John James Audubon, the naturalist painter and chronicler of “The Birds of America.” Before Audubon gained fame as an ornithologist, he was the taxidermist for Cincinnati’s Western Museum, founded by Dr. Daniel Drake in 1820. The museum couldn’t afford to pay Audubon, so Drake encouraged him to paint all the birds of North America.

Gen. John T. Thompson, inventor of the Thompson submachine gun, or Tommy gun, was born in Newport.(Photo: Enquirer file)

• Tommy gun. The Thompson submachine gun was invented in 1918 by Gen. John T. Thompson, who was born in 1860 at the Southgate House in Newport. The rapid-fire gun was intended for trench fighting during World War I, but was developed too late for the war. Instead, the “Tommy gun” became the infamous weapon of the Chicago gangster, much to the dismay of the gun’s creator.

• Cleveland Browns. Around here we identify Paul Brown with the Bengals, but he first made his name with — and gave his name to — the Cleveland Browns. Brown rejected the idea at first, so team owner Arthur McBride held a naming contest, but the winning entry, Panthers, was already owned. Brown finally relented to use his name, but still wasn’t comfortable with the idea, so he spread the rumor that the team was named for popular boxer Joe Louis, known as the “Brown Bomber,” to be associated with a winner. Brown later admitted the team was named for him.

Paul Brown, right, with quarterback Otto Graham, lent his name to the Cleveland Browns.(Photo: AP Photo)